Death Among the Undead

Soji Shimada, author of "The Toko Zodiac Murders"

"Death Among the Undead" is the only novel ever to have achieved first place in all four major annual mystery fiction rankings in Japan. It was an overnight sensation and was turned into a film and a manga.

Its success was due to the novel twist of adding zombies to a shin honkaku country house setting, but fans of locked room mysteries and closed circle plots need not worry. The iron-clad rules regarding the zombies' behaviour and existence are rigorously observed, and are used to create the boundaries of the mystery in a highly ingenious way.

A dozen students decide to rent a boarding house in the mountains. A nearby bioterrorism event results in the house being surrounded by zombies. Initially they are repelled by the occupants using swords and spears, but then a murder occurs inside a room locked on the inside. A human could not have made the bite marks that killed the victim, but a zombie could not have got into the room to make them.

More murders occur. Theories abound, but are knocked down as soon as they are proposed. The solution is an extraordinary exercise in deduction.

Locked Room International translates and publishes the works of international impossible crime authors past and present.